IN FOCUS

Now that the 'Alberta' book is mostly behind me, I am immersed in the production of my 'Ontario' book! I have been thinking about doing this book since 2005 just after I released my 'Canada' book. I seriously began photographing for this book in 2008 after publishing two other books: 'Georgian Bay' (2008) and 'Muskoka' (2010). When Key Porter Books went into receivership in 2011, those plans fell through. Luckily for me, I had retained the rights to all of my books and Turnstone Press of Winnipeg (publisher of my 'Prairie and Beyond' book) agreed to take on the Ontario project.

While the 'Canadian Prairies' has become my adopted home, I was born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario. That's where all my childhood memories are. While attending university and up until I left Ontario for Alberta in late 1978, I managed to experience much of the Central region of the province (what the politicians call Northern Ontario!). In the late 1990s, I traveled through many parts of southern Ontario to produce a number of business/tourism books for cities like London, Hamilton, Kitchener & Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph. I even collaborated on 'Healing The Landscape' book (2001) about the reclamation of the Sudbury Region. When I moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1985, I then began to explore Northwestern Ontario. Through the various trips back and forth from Edmonton / Winnipeg to Sudbury to visit family and friends, as well as all those business trips, I accumulated a significant amount of imagery of the province.

This week I rummaged through a filing cabinet of Ontario slides and short-listed 400 slides. I then searched for high res files on my hard drives, found 560 and copied them to a folder for further consideration. Then came the task of going through 8 hard drives of RAW unprocessed images to select another 1300 images. My first round of editing resulted in a first selection of 2,260 images. In the next couple of days, I will edit the 2,260 photographs down to about 250 images, thus rejecting 90% of that initial selection. It's not an easy task to be sure, especially when many of these are my favorites. But there is only room for so many images in a book and one must be ruthless during the editing process. Images will be chosen for various reasons including: geographic representation, variety of subject matter, landscapes vs intimate views, wildlife and plants, seasons, time of day, color, horizontal vs vertical, etc. I will then spend a great deal of time matching or pairing images on a 'page spread' so that the images complement each other creating continuity, visual flow and harmony. I thought you might enjoy some insight into what goes on in producing a book. I hope to produce the best Ontario book yet!

Attached is a small sampler of some of the images from different regions that will probably be included in the book. Wish me luck !